


Contact and Search

by Baozhale



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Autistic!Dairine, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-06 23:41:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1876902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baozhale/pseuds/Baozhale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine gets down to business with the mobiles, and Darryl gets down to being really, really impressed. And kind of overloaded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contact and Search

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AtypicalOwl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtypicalOwl/gifts).



Dairine, GIGO, and Darryl's transit circle slid along the mobile's planets surface where they had just arrived, and just as she had seen last time, trying not to think about who was _not_ beside her this time, she saw the ground become granular with mobiles. _Definitely millions, now, if it wasn't millions before._ She could feel the emotions running through her connection to the Motherboard before she could make out any of the individual mobiles or hear anyone besides GIGO. 

 

As they drew closer, the crowd of mobiles drew in around the mobile transit circle. Dairine still couldn’t see past the first few layers of surrounding mobiles, but through her contact with the surface she could feel the building wave of emotion running back and forth through the substrate that connected them all.  _Wonder what Darryl's making of this?_ She looked to her right, and she saw that his mouth hung open as he rocked from side to side.  _Almost like an upside-down pendulum_ . 

 

She thought to take her shoes off. The environment was controlled for her anyways, and it would get her in circuit with the motherboard, skin to skin contact, so long as she didn't run. As before, the contact shocked her, and she needed a moment to compose herself, watching herself through so many eyes. When she looked up, familiar shapes pressed in out of the crowd toward her and Darryl and Spot and Gigo—mobiles Dairine had designed herself, seen born from the planet’s crust, and named. Tall mobiles and short ones, fat round ones and low flat ones all crowded around. “Welcome!” the mobiles shouted, those she recognized and new designs alike, with voices, or silently, through the Motherboard: “Welcome, Mother, welcome, Creator, welcome here, welcome home!”

 

The circle kept moving, and she recognized more of the mobiles she'd seen born on Ordeal. “Beanpole!” she yelled, and grabbed him … and then the shorter mobile behind him, all arms and lenses. “Hex! Oh, and Pinout, look at you!” And behind Pinout came Loop and Sulu and Storm and Truman and Augusta, String and Strikeout and Drive and Buffer and Peek and Poke … a crowd of mobiles through whom Dairine made her way, hugging them one after another until she felt like her front was one big bruise, yet again. Last of all came one of the smallest and plainest of the mobile models, just a dome with legs. Logo stood in front of Dairine, not shy this time.

 

Dairine picked him up and hugged Logo with her eyes squeezed shut. The sight of it brought her Ordeal back in unusual clarity—a long, cold, nerve-racking time full of impromptu bologna sandwiches and the gleam of that red sun on the pale glass of the plain, the glitter of the plain as it shattered under the upward-heaving bodies of the newborn mobiles, the darkness that fell over them all as the Lone Power arrived to interfere in yet another species’ Choice. It reminded her of a different darkness too, the one where her partner on her last recent trip here had fought the darkness and gone, well, so thoroughly missing not even the Powers knew where he was. She hoped Roshaun could wind up in such good shape as Logo had.

 

“What brings you out all this way again?” Logo asked her. “Slowlife get to you worse after being back here with the quicklife?” Dairine still wasn't sure how she could read Logo's expressions (or tone) but she knew that it was teasing... mostly.

 

“Bit more complicated than that,” she admitted, then turned to look at Darryl again, staring interestedly at a slightly softer mat which had appeared in the right shape for him to sit cross-legged. “Darryl wanted to know more about you after he heard about all your imagine, and I have... more personal reasons as well. I'll want to speak to the imaging team again, as soon as may be, and I don't know what Darryl will be most interested in.”

 

“ _Everything_ ,” Darryl said. 

 

Dairine raised an eyebrow at him. “Everything the way our friends here mean it, gathering all the data in the universe, or everything the way most humans mean it, all kinds of things or as much as we've got time for?”

 

“Can I want it to be the first while admitting it's going to be the second? I might be _really_ good at concentrating on things, but there are a lot of things here. And... I feel like I shouldn't be away from Earth for too long, somehow.” His right hand was now at shoulder height, flapping rapidly. 

 

In her connection to the motherboard, she asked if it would be possible to tie Darryl in to communications while he stood on the surface without putting him through the ordeal she'd had on her Ordeal, and milliseconds later she received the reply that they could, so long as he was willing. She asked.

 

Darryl's face lit up. “That's  _brilliant!_ So much... faster... more reliable than speaking.” 

 

“They want you to confirm it three times, same as Spot asked me,” Dairine informed him.

 

“Yes, yes, and yes good enough?” he asked.

 

Presumably it was, because faster than Dairine's brain of carbon could process, Darryl's thoughts joined the undercurrent of the mobiles. “This is  _really cool_ ” Darryl said through the link. “But kind of overloading to deal with so many thoughts all at once.” He started rocking faster, and his hands moved towards his ears.

 

Dairine could sympathize. Even with the effects of having been made a mobile herself, the full current of the mobile's thoughts took some getting used to. And she'd had much more time to grow accustomed to the background level she heard, even at home. But the mobiles seemed to be modifying Darryl's connection as they went, making sure he could use it and hear what he needed without overloading, so she turned her attention back to her search for Roshaun.

 

Even though she was “speaking” via mind, she still felt a lump in her throat as she started to explain. “The wizard who came with me last time I was here, recently, is missing. Spot comes up with a blank status for him. I don't know what that means, but I figured that if anyone would know what it meant, or what to do about it, it'd be all of you. Maybe your imaging team, if there are ways you could help search?”

 

Threads and threads of discussion spread off, far too fast for her to follow. “no coordinates” came up repeatedly, along with “data sources” and “memory acquisition.”

 

“Like when you got the message I was carrying, or on my Ordeal when I gave the Motherboard everything I had?” Dairine asked, nervous now. Her memory of replaying her entire life before the Motherboards memory storage was unpleasant, to say the least, though she would do it another hundred times if it helped find Roshaun. (She still really hoped it wouldn't require her to do that another hundred times.)

 

“More like the spell we used to get your message, though without needing to break containers this time.

 

“How long will that spell diagram take to build? Even quicklife couldn't have built that one quickly.”

 

“Many of the pieces can be re-used, however.” The next bit of thought seemed directed at Darryl, though Dairine could still hear it. “Would you also be willing to share any memories where Roshaun is present?”

 

Dairine caught a sense of a shrug, as well as that of a person steeling themselves for a potentially unpleasant necessity. “If it helps find Dairine's friend, I can deal, but meltdown warning for after.”

 

Darryl then explained to the mobiles, faster than speech but still in the range that a carbon-based brain could think, what a meltdown was, how it felt (complete with some images and sensations which Dairine turned away from in self-protection), how he dealt with them, the best (and worst) things for those around him to do, how it tended to look from outside so they could recognize one (no images came with the rather general descriptions- Darryl only had fuzzy internal pictures for the times he'd lost control, and he wasn't about to show what anyone  _else_ in meltdown looked like without their permission.)

 

Explanations done (for now) but spell diagram not, Darryl turned to watch the mobiles creating faster than his eyes could track, let alone understand. “Like drinking from a firehose,” Dairine heard him think, inciting a laugh.

 

“And to them it's like we're practically frozen in time.” She thought back to the last spell she had done with the mobiles- her children, really, though she was still too young for children in the typical sense. She'd seen herself as they saw her, and while she had no desire to live as the mobile envelope suggested to her on Ordeal, she could understand how they might suggest such a thing. She shared the images over the connection they currently shared with the Motherboard, and it was Darryl's turn to laugh.

 

“You, slower than molasses? You think faster than most anyone I know, even faster than I can at the best of times.” She heard a tiny bitterness under that- the best of times were rare in a world determined to pretend people thought and perceived alike, especially for someone who oh so obviously _didn't_. A hint of a choice not regretted, as such, but with anger at a world that made the results harder to deal with than they should be. It paralleled the anger the Motherboard had gotten from her, when she became a mobile, but with threads of awareness of different reasons, different excuses at the least. _The way to avoid getting hurt is to know things-really know them_ paired with _People who think they know things but don't make everything worse_. _But they were going to have to be different on the inside, too, to do any good_ dovetailed with the awareness of being different, a decision to remain so, and pain at the world's insistence that he was _too_ different. _Not wrong, just different_ played against insistence that too different still made wrong.

 

The two sat in silence as mobiles bustled around them, processing the results of their linked thoughts. Though the labor was mental, not physical, Dairine found herself breathing hard, and she noticed distantly that she and Darryl were rocking in time with each other.

 

Darryl cracked a smile. “Ouch.”

 

“Yup. And still easier than when they made me a mobile on Ordeal.”

 

He shuddered. “Sounds useful, but... ouch. Worth it?”

 

Dairine had to laugh. “Considering what would have happened otherwise, yeah. But I don't recommend it, especially for  _you_ . How does losing the ability to say that you're fully human and not a machine or an alien sound?”

 

Darryl winced. “Point taken.”

 

“Data transfer?” GIGO asked, aloud.

 

Dairine laughed. “Sure.” Darryl just looked confused.

 

“What is the problem with losing that ability?”

 

Darryl sighed and looked down. “Because people... on my planet, at least in certain places, people think it's more acceptable to kill someone if they're not really human. So we point out that we're human. Not machines, not aliens... not that there's anything wrong with those things, but since there aren't societies of those living on our planet yet and it's an easier fight than convincing people there's nothing wrong with those things. Usually.”

 

GIGO somehow managed to look more confused. “Should I just give them everything I've got? Like you did?” Darryl asked Dairine.

 

Dairine remembered those moments on her Ordeal, feeling like an eternity, where she had given the Motherboard all her memories. She wouldn't wish the experience on _anyone_. “GIGO here warned me, before I did it, that I didn't have the memory to sustain the contact. And I didn't, but they stretched it as it went, and the Motherboard read my whole life like a data file. Unless they can use the same method to pull the single memory, that one time you spent with Roshaun where he vanished, to get all of it? I'd suggest against.”

 

The next laugh came from the Motherboard. “We have improved quite a bit, since you came here first and we were born. Your friend would not go through the same ordeal that you endured on yours, even to copy all his memories.”

 

“Then you can have them,” Darryl thought. There was an undercurrent of determination, that if the collection of a beings entire memory could be stored, that his be so, and prove beyond doubt that he _did_ have an internal life, even before the language that was valued so highly- now even by him, for it was the building block of wizardry, but not at the expense of lives which never learned the human forms of it.

 

Soon enough, the spell diagrams were ready. Mobiles gathered, some to be more active participants, some to provide power, some to image and record, some simply to watch. “I'm not a mobile, even a little bit, you know,” Darryl reminded Dairine. “If whatever they're doing demands faster reactions than I can give?”

 

Dairine nodded. “Our friends are faster than I can be, even as part mobile, but I'll keep my eye out as best I can. To watch them handle it perfectly, of course.”

 

Logo turned to Darryl and Dairine. “Does the ground suit?”

 

_Just as dangerous as it was last time, I suppose, though experience must help_ . 

 

Darryl nodded, rocking slightly. “If it helps find Roshaun, all ground suits,” Dairine said. She was already properly in circuit with the Motherboard, and Darryl removed his shoes to match hers. He wobbled and nearly fell.

 

“Ready” the Motherboard asked Dairine.

 

“Go for it,” Dairine said, and the wizards began their spelling. The power started to build. Dairine felt “taps” from this world into other universes open up, spilling unimaginable amounts of force into the wizardry. Time began to stretch as the mobiles’ perception of what was happening swamped her own. Dairine started to see herself as the mobiles did—a life-form seemingly frozen in time, and as a spell diagram, tidily compartmentalized. The combined intention of the Motherboard and the mobiles sought down through her structure. _Want everything since I left, or just the memories Roshaun is in?_ Dairine asked in spell. _Up to you,_ she heard back. _Go with everything, better not to miss anything_.

 

Compartment to compartment they went, checking time stamps. Anything in memory that had been edited in the last-goodness, had it really been over a year and a half- got examined more closely. Each compartment grew until every intricacy of its contents was made plain in a delicate lacework spattering of pale light, like nightside cities seen from space, then copied to the Motherboard's memory. This time, with information not encrypted by the Powers, there was no need to break capsules, and unlike her first trip, there was also no need for her to re-experience the memories contained within.

 

Her information copied, they turned to Darryl. Contrary to his worry, he seemed to have been brought temporarily into the time perception of quicklife, and at the moment he was handling it. Not that there would be many moments- there was no need to check time stamps on _his_ memory, as they were simply taking the lot, and despite the greater quantity the ability to delay even the most basic processing and organization meant he was done even faster than Dairine had been. Within seconds, they were both panting on the ground where the spell diagram had been.

 

Once Darryl composed himself enough for coherent thought, he sent the message through the circuitry: “I think I'm ready to be done now.” Dairine agreed, and this time, she could afford the break.

**Author's Note:**

> I did re-use some concepts from here in my original work, Where None Have Thought To Go.   
> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N18VLV0


End file.
